Every facilitator knows that conflict in groups can actually be a good thing. It is often a healthy sign that a group has established enough basic trust to raise tensions. Skillfully navigated, conflict can build trust, strengthen relationships, and enhance the effectiveness of team functioning. Poorly navigated, conflict can be a real setback for group effectiveness. That skillful navigation part is key, and a central part of professional development in our field. I for one am always interested in […]
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Transitions & Reflections on The Groupaya Way
I’m pleased to share that I have been offered a job as a senior facilitator for sustainable food and water systems work with Ag Innovations in Sebastopol, CA. This is a really exciting learning and professional development opportunity for me in a topic area very close to my heart, and I have recently transitioned to this full time role with Joseph McIntyre and a new amazing team of passionate change agents. And of course the sad news is the […]
What Makes Us Come Alive At Work?
Last year, I participated in one of Eugene Eric Kim’s collaborative literacy experiments called Changemaker bootcamp. In this series of monthly meetings, a half-dozen professionals gathered to learn from each other about best practices and “muscle building” for building our own collaborative literacy and facilitation skills. After the series ended, we met up occasionally for gatherings hosted by participants. One of these meetings, run by Marie Haller of Impact Hub San Francisco and Eugene Chan of PolicyLink, taught me one of the […]
Leaps of Faith for Healthy Hearts
Experiments in participatory process design for patient-powered research As I mentioned in my recent blog post introducing our work with The Health eHeart Alliance, there’s a new movement afoot in the world of health care. It’s not talked about too much yet in the media – it’s not about fancy drug trials or big business. It’s about patients, and to me it’s one of the more exciting and potentially transformative movements in the history of health care in the US. […]
The Health eHeart Alliance Debuts a New Approach to Collaborative Research
For the last year, with Groupaya’s favorite collaboration ninja Rebecca Petzel, I have had the pleasure of working on a ground-breaking project for medical research. With the stellar Health eHeart Study team at UCSF and a dozen patient and patient organization representatives, we have been slowly building a new kind of network — an alliance between patients, caregivers, and researchers to produce patient-powered and patient-centered research. This network is part of a budding movement, supported largely by The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute […]